Roy frowned. “It would consume any one of us.”
“But if there were several?”
“I’ll see what I can do, but no one is going to agree to be encircled with a collector.”
I guess I couldn’t blame them. “Could you get them to stand by in the land of the dead? In case the rider attempts to escape that way?” Though I had the feeling if it crossed completely into the land of the dead, it wouldn’t be able to make it back on its own. Still, better safe than sorry.
It said something about my friends that when I turned around no one was looking at me like I was crazy for speaking to thin air. Rianna had tapped into the grave to listen, but Holly and Caleb didn’t even bat an eye.
I had good friends.
“Okay, so everyone clear on what to do next?” Everyone, even the ghost, nodded.
“I’m not,” a new voice said as the front door of the office opened. “I see you’re alive, Craft. I heard a rumor you got your heart ripped out.”
We all turned to stare at Briar.
“Same rumor says it was torn out by that handsome guardian angel of yours and that you then stood up, picked up your heart, and fled the scene.”
Okay, now everyone was staring at me.
“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” I said, but my recently repaired heart felt like it might explode if it pounded any faster.
To my relief, Briar shrugged. “So you’re hunting the rider. Fill me in.”
“He’s in there,” I said, pointing to the community theater building.
“And how did you suddenly gain the ability to track the rider?” Briar asked, as she checked the bolt in her crossbow.
“Not the rider, the man he’s riding,” I said through gritted teeth. I was exhausted. I’d spent most of the day away from my life essence while the rider sucked on it, which definitely didn’t help. At the same time I’d had to work with Rianna, first learning the order in which the runes needed to be activated and then puzzling out the artifact—which had turned into a spear as soon as she touched it.
The plan was moving forward, the trap half set. I had the spirit box, which was small enough to carry one-handed but Caleb assured me could hold whatever size spirit or any amount of energy I needed to shove in it. Holly and Rianna had a double ring of circles ready to be erected behind the theater. Now I just needed Briar to stop asking questions and do her part.
“Well, I guess when you hear the screaming, you’ll know it’s done,” she said, stepping around the corner and striding toward the small theater.
“Just drop him. Don’t hurt him,” I called after her, but if she heard, she made no indication.
She was right about one thing. People screamed.
Caleb and I exchanged a glance, and then we both ran for the theater. We were headed against the flow as we pushed our way into the building that people were trying to escape as fast as possible.
Briar stood in the center of the theater, her badge over head, yelling her credentials and commanding everyone to remain calm. Clearly that failed, but her aim had been dead-on. Death sat slumped in a seat in the front row.
“You get his feet,” Caleb told me, and I nodded.
Caleb took Death by the shoulders and in that way we carried him toward the emergency exit. Briar opened the door for us, the alarm going off as she did, but the patrons had already evacuated, so it couldn’t make anything worse.
We carried Death’s unconscious body past the edge of the first inactive circle and into the center of the second. Then Caleb retreated, and Rianna walked into the circle, the enormous relic-turned-spear in her hand. When she channeled the grave through the spear, she could physically touch Roy. I only hoped it would be enough to protect her from the rider.
“Everyone ready?” I asked and got a chorus of nods. But am I ready? I had to be. “Remember, don’t drop the circles until the rider is trapped or destroyed, no matter what happens.”
This time the nods were more hesitant.
“Be careful, Al,” Caleb said.
“I will. Just keep the circles up.” I took a deep breath and then nodded to Rianna and Holly. “I’m ready. Let’s do it.”
Rianna’s circle was the inner one, and it sprang to life first, followed closely by Holly’s. I didn’t bother erecting a third circle—my Aetheric magic was the weakest in the group. The two different colors of their magic barriers obscured the world beyond the circles but I smiled at Holly, Caleb, and Briar’s silhouettes. Then there was no more prep work.
“Moment of truth,” I muttered. I pulled my dagger from my boot. Then I knelt beside Death’s prone form and opened the spirit box before setting it beside my knees. Using the dagger, I opened a deep cut in my finger—I didn’t want it closing before I finished tracing the runes.
“Al?” Rianna sounded uncertain.
I hadn’t told her I planned to use blood magic.
“Just be ready, and don’t let go of the grave.”
She nodded, her knuckles turning white around the shaft of her spear.
I looked down at the man who held half my life, who’d become mortal to save me.
“No matter what happens, I want you to live,” I whispered to him despite the fact I knew he couldn’t hear. Then I placed my hand on his cheek, opened myself and gave his essence a push. It didn’t want to be in me anyway, it belonged with its soul. As Death’s cold immortality fled my body, my own living essence flooded back into my body.
Death’s eyes flew open, Briar’s spells no longer affecting him. He separated from the rider as well. For a moment they occupied the same space, but no longer the same body or even the same plane.
I gave myself one single heartbeat to smile at him. “Live,” I said, and then grabbed the box at my side.
The rider rose like a black tide, but I didn’t stand—that would just be farther to fall. I touched the first glyph on the box, saying the name Rianna had taught me and letting my blood fill the thin groove as I traced the intricate shape. Magic rushed through me and the rune glowed blue.
The rider descended on me, ripping at the wounds in my soul, trying to draw my living energy out of me. I couldn’t fight back. Couldn’t defend myself. I just had to endure as I activated the glyph.
The rider reared back, the head of Rianna’s spear emerging through its dark form. It bought me time as she pulled the spear back and drove it into the rider again. The creature descended on her, and Rianna screamed.
I looked up, still in the middle of the third glyph. Then the first seizure hit. The box fell from my hands.
Fuck.
I did the only thing left to me. As my body began to convulse, I threw open my shields and lunged at where the rider ripped at Rianna’s soul. Sinking my hands into the creature, I fell into the land of the dead, taking the rider with me.
Chapter 41
The buildings crumbled. Turned to dust. Then even the dust vanished.
I stopped falling. The waste.
The rider bellowed in rage. I thought its earlier attacks had been vicious, now they turned into an onslaught. I was too weak to fight back.
Then a shimmery form flickered somewhere in my peripheral and a ghost dove through the rider, taking a piece of the creature with it.
The rider howled. He grabbed for the offending ghost. Two more dive-bombed him. Then another ghost appeared. The rider lashed out at random, but the ghosts were quick, flitting away while another hit the rider from a different direction.
“Up you go,” Roy said, as arms lifted me by the armpits.
“You got the ghosts.”
“Hey, it was my job, right boss?” He smiled and shoved his thick glasses farther up his nose. “You don’t look so good.”
I looked down at myself. Neither the soul nor the psyche can bleed, but it could show tears. He was right. I looked bad.
“Well, you going to join the buffet?” he asked. Then he darted forward, taking his own chunk of the rider.
It had shrunk in size, its darkness thinning. I couldn’t quite see through it, but at the rate the ghosts were stealing away chunks of it, I’d be able to soon. I hated the idea of that thing’s sludgelike energy in me, but I reached out anyway, drawing hard. A thick funnel of energy shot from it to me and the rider screamed. He shrank. I, on the other hand, felt more steady on my feet, if a little greasy from the energy’s source. Reaching out, I drew more energy.
“Alex.”
I paused. I knew that voice. I couldn’t remember why. But I knew it.
“Alex, are you out there?”
It was a female voice. Somewhere far away a woman with red curls and blazing green eyes stood, straddling an enormous chasm.
Rianna.
I looked around. I was in the waste. No grave witch was supposed to reach the waste, and I couldn’t feel the land of the living.
“Alex, if you can hear me, you need to get back to your body. Now. Your collector caught a part of your soul and is holding it in your body, but you need to come back.”
My body. Where was it?
“Roy? How do I get out of here?”
The ghost looked over at me, stopping midattack. “You go up.”
Up?
I looked around. There, right behind me, was a thin silver thread that shimmered like a soul. My soul.
It led up, and up.
Arms grabbed mine. “Come on, Alex,” Roy said, pulling me. “Time for you to get out of here.”
He pulled again and the wastes changed. He wasn’t the only ghost with me either. A dozen hands grabbed at me, pushing and pulling me toward the surface. The farther I traveled the more the world around me rematerialized. Dust turned to crumbled ruins, and then to dilapidated buildings. But the farther I got, the thinner the thread became.
I’m running out of time.
The ghosts pulled harder and the landscape smeared past me as I sped along, following the thinning thread. Then I hit the chasm. A chasm I was on the wrong side of.
“This is the end of the line for us,” James Kingly’s ghost said.
I looked out across the impossibly large chasm. How was I supposed to cross that abyss? In my hand, the thread tethering my soul to my body thinned.